In June 2002, Rich Skrenta, along with 4 others, started developing a new kind of web-based news service.

Most Internet news is strictly keyword focused, and any correlation to geographic location is purely accidental. Not so with Topix.net, the only news service that allows users to truly search by location. http://www.topix.net

Rich's previous experience lends itself well to such a mammoth project. He was director of engineering for AOL Shopping, AOL Music, and Netscape Search. He was also the co-founder & CEO of NewHoo, which became the Open Directory Project, the largest human-edited directory of the web. He and the other founders have worked together as a team for many years, at Sun Microsystems, Netscape, America Online, and several startups in-between.

So out of all the projects they could have tackled, what prompted the decision to create Topix.net?

"We were disappointed with the existing locally-targeted sites from the major portals, and thought that our technology could give users a better experience", Rich says.

I agree. Search Google News for information about my hometown, Orange Texas, and you get results about a super bowl party where everybody's wearing burnt orange, or a Texas inmate in a prison in Orange, California.

Contrast that with Topix, where you can search by zip code and get exactly what you're looking for, plus information on surrounding areas. I asked Rich to explain how Topix works. "Topix.net classifies every incoming story by location and topic," he says. "This lets users read news around their city from multiple sources, or read news about their industry, hobby, or favorite sports team. The ability to drill-down to a ZIP code view of the news, or news about an individual such as a musician or sports figure is what differentiates Topix.net from other news aggregators."

"The classification is driven by some fairly complicated AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms, and a massive Knowledge Base that knows the name of every street, park, hospital, jail, river, etcetera, in the U.S., as well as the names of every public company and the top offices, the names of every band and musician and all the of the songs and albums they've published, every sports team including the team roster, and so on. Our Knowledge Base recognizes approximately 10 million probabilistic patterns to classify stories into 150,000 subjects."

Whew.

Topix also lets advertisers narrowly target readers on the site by location, profession or interests. This is geotargeting in its most reliable form -- by zip code rather than by I.P. address, which is how many companies offer geographically targeted ads.

"Effectively targetting local users online has been the holy grail since the Internet was invented.", says Rich. "Even with the new local search offerings from the portals, if you're a local business, it's very difficult to buy keyword-driven advertising from an search engine."

"Where should the keyword 'Springfield' go -- that is a very common city name. The search engines do not disambiguate common place names; they do not know what towns are adjacent to one another; and their ability to detect where users are surfing from based on the user IP address is limited."

The folks at Topix believe that news has become a powerful draw for online users, and by delivering focused subject and geographical news, they can best target what Internet users want to read.

Based on the increasing number of online users searching for local content, this is a safe bet. And Topix gives web portal owners a way to provide content that's not only relevant but fresh, updated continuously. This is easily accomplished using the built-in RSS feeds, which supply syndicated local news headlines for others to add to their websites.

For example, I was able to paste a single line Javascript code into a page on our local portal, which causes local headlines to be displayed and updated without any further changes. You can choose the color scheme as well, so the headlines can match the look and feel of your site.

I asked Rich who's the intended audience for Topix.net. http://www.topix.net

"Everyone who lives somewhere, works somewhere, follows a sports team, likes music or movies, or wants to read about health topics online."

Topix also has a comprehensive set of B2B business vertical news pages which target industry news. But the bulk of the site is consumer-focused. The planned enhancements reflect the consumer focus as well.

"We plan to add a 'My Topix' tab to the site, to let users customize their own personal view of the news based on our categorization."

In addition to user features, Topix will also include a turnkey system, allowing local merchants to purchase geographically served ads online. Another possibility is an affiliate program, or some other revenue sharing model to motivate web portal owners to help spread the word about Topix.

With 100 billion in overall local ad revenues up for grabs, Rich sees plenty of opportunities ahead in the local online market.

"I believe advertising at the local level has many inefficiencies. Sometimes an advertiser will pay hundreds of dollars for a single walk-in, other times they will pay $30 and receive much greater exposure. I believe if effective ROI tracking was possible at the local level, local ad spending would go up, since advertisers could more directly see the benefits of their advertising expenditures."

When asked whether they're planning more products to address the online needs of local business, Rich says, "No comment -- but I'll be happy to announce them on GeoLocal when they're ready."

Sounds like we'll be seeing a lot more of Rich and his team in the future.

http://www.topix.net